Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and senior adviser to the humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

 program at the Radcliffe Institute. Her specialties include 18th-century French and contemporary art.

Lajer-Burcharth received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York

City University of New York

The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

 and her M.A. at the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw

University of Warsaw

The University of Warsaw is the largest university in Poland and one of the most prestigious, ranked as best Polish university in 2010 and 2011...

, Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

. In 1999, Lajer-Burcharth published Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press

Yale University Press

Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

). In 2000, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

. In 2009-2010 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Forthcoming publications include A Touch of Self: Painting and Individuality in the Eighteenth Century and Interiors: Spaces of the Self.

Selection of writings

• "David's Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory," Art History, vol. 14, No. 3 (September 1991)

• "The Aesthetics of Male Crisis: the Terror in the Republican Imaginary and in Jacques-Louis David's Work from Prison, " in Gill Perry and Michael Rossington, eds., Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture (Manchester University Press, 1994)

• "Real Bodies: Video in the Nineties," Art History (June 1997)

• "Antoni's Difference," differences, 10.2 (Spring 1998)

• "Sam Taylor-Wood: The Soliloquious Vision," Parkett, no. 55 (1999)

• "Pipilotti Rist," Artforum (September, 2000)

• "Lequeu's Corpus: Lascivious Architecture," in Self and History. Essays in Honour of Linda Nochlin, Aruna D'Souza, ed. (Thames & Hudson, 2000)

• "Pompadour's Touch: Difference in Representation," Representations, 73 (Winter, 2001)

• “Fragonard in detail,” differences, Fall 2003

• "Genre and Sex," in Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century France Philip Conisbee, ed., (CASVA and National Gallery of Art Publications: 2005)

• "The Subject as Object," in The Lure of the Object, Stephen Melville, ed. (Clark Art Institute Publications: 2006)